Driving Cross-Team Collaboration in Online communities

Driving Cross-Team Collaboration in Online Communities

Alok Ramsisaria, CEO, Grazitti Interactive discusses how brands can harness the power of community to cross-collaborate and deliver ROI – and how each of your teams can benefit from your community

Online communities saw a surge in usage as the world shifted from offline to online. Not only did they become a key medium for businesses to stay connected with their customers, but they also emerged as a crucial channel for organizations to ideate and innovate.

For many organizations, the true meaning of online communities was to maintain a humanized relationship with their members and ensure customer success. However, increased virtual engagement highlighted the multi-dimensional nature of online communities.

When leveraged the right way, every department of an organization can benefit from the think tank that a community is. When seeking to advance their innovative portfolio, brands can harness the power of communities to cross-collaborate and develop solutions that cater to the needs of their customers, and bring ROI to the table.

CROSS-TEAM COLLABORATION - UNDERSTANDING THE ROLE OF ONLINE COMMUNITIES

Primarily, online communities were designed to better understand customers and stay connected with them. But the role of communities is not limited to this. Your sales, product, and marketing teams can benefit greatly from communities if given access.

“When leveraged the right way, every department of an organization can benefit from the think tank that a community is”

Communities generate a lot of customer data. Different organizational departments can gain better customer insights from this available data to analyze customer behavior. This will enable them to create products and services that revolve around the customer’s preferences and needs. Let’s deep dive into how each team can benefit from this super tool.

Sales Team - Boosting Conversions With Lead Management Through Communities

A key part of any sales process is establishing trust, interest, or incentive for the customer to move from their status quo. However, the reality is that even if your product/service is better or more efficient; customers will still be skeptical.

That is where online communities can help.

One of the cornerstones of the sales process is to deliver helpful content to aid prospects, highlight what makes your products/services unique, and establish yourself as an authoritative source of information. You can break down the community into four main sections to arm your sales teams with relevant content, as well as build trust among their prospects.

• Stories: To encourage members to share their experiences with peers. • Forum: To arrange all the topics in a manner that your community members can easily navigate through them and ask

questions, give feedback, or advice. • Articles: To feature content created by forum members to help their fellow members. • Events: To showcase any upcoming events that may be of interest to the members.

And communities give you a place to gain ‘super users’ who can tell prospects how great your service/product is instead of your sales team pitching it.

Product Team - Innovating to Create Robust Products and Services With Communities

Online communities are a goldmine for the generation of powerful ideas. Members contribute to the community by exchanging ideas, sharing their feedback about a product or service, and discussing solutions for complex challenges.

This is where product development teams can benefit immensely. Online communities provide access to tons of data that product managers can leverage to analyze user psychology, challenges, and ideas to innovate. Online communities are a key medium for product development teams to make customers a part of a product’s journey and boost engagement. Also, for organizations, it is an opportunity to connect with their members on a deeper level and generate loyal brand advocates. Your online community is as much a product as the core products you sell. Based on who your community is for, it can be the ‘product’ people engage with before they buy your core product or after it.

Communities can be a great way to identify when your audience is in the buyer’s journey, and when they become a part of your community.

This can help marketing teams create effective marketing strategies to:

• Engage and nurture prospective buyers • Create content that is relevant to your members • Boost brand awareness

It only takes a single idea to create products and services that stand out. But identifying these gems is an uphill battle. With tons of information available, your teams get the largest incentive to read between the lines and take your product/ service to the next level.

Communities that support cross-collaboration between departments empower your teams to unlock the wisdom that members share, thus enabling them to harvest ideas, conversations, and feedback to innovate and boost ROI. Here’s more from our community hub:

[Case Study] Setting Up a Customized Search Community From Scratch on Vanilla Forums to Connect Family Members Globally

[Blog Post] 4 Quintessential Reasons for Small Businesses to Leverage Online Communities

[Webinar] Understanding the 202 of Security in Online Communities

[Event] Community (re)Focus, 2021

Check out our resource center for the latest updates on community trends, innovations, and more.

Take Me There

Grazitti Interactive is a digital innovation leader with extensive experience in developing robust solutions that unlock the true potential of your online communities.

We offer a wide range of products and services that empower you to take your community experience a notch up. Our products include:

• Khoros- Salesforce Case Connector • Salesforce Knowledge and Khoros Connector • Higher Logic-Salesforce Case Connector • IdeasPro • ScoreNotch • Community Utilities

Our Community Management as a Service (CMaaS) has a broad spectrum that encompasses elements such as strategy, design, development, moderation, and more.

Our community-building prowess caters to a variety of leading platforms such as Khoros, Salesforce, Jive, HigherLogic, Vanilla, Insided, and more. The silver lining- we’re also partners with these industry giants!

“ORGANIZATIONS, TODAY, ARE REIMAGINING THE COMMUNITY LANDSCAPE BY LEVERAGING ADVANCED COMMUNITY TOOLS LIKE AI AND ML. AND WE SEE COMMUNITIES ENABLING BRANDS TO IDENTIFY OPPORTUNITIES AND CAPITALIZE ON THE BENEFITS THEY BRING TO THE TABLE IN THE FORM OF INCREASED ENGAGEMENT AND ADVOCACY.”